Nurturing existential resilience through wandering and wondering in early childhood education and care

Drawing on Matteo Cattaneo's notion of w/o/andering and Alison Clark's work on slow knowledge, the authors explore how wandering and wondering can serve as a pedagogical practice to nurture children's existential resilience within early childhood education and care. The inquiry is based on a filmed and observed walk in the local surrounding environment undertaken by a group of 13 children (aged three to four) and three adults in an early childhood education and care setting. Through an engagement with speculative vignettes, thinking with theory becomes a method for exploring how the courage to deviate from pre-planned routes, both physical and mental, holds possibilities for pockets of wonder. Such pockets emerge when educators and children allow themselves to dwell in moments that do not necessarily aim at producing concrete answers or predetermined knowledge outcomes. Instead, these moments cultivate an attentiveness to the extraordinary within the seemingly ordinary, nurturing children's attunement to the human and more-than-human world in ways that deepen their sense of connection, curiosity, and existential resilience.